The Reason Lincoln Had to Die

[mikegriffith1]

(01-13-2019 03:08 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Mr. G. - Please go back and read the mountains of responses that you have received to the majority of your theories and propositions, and you will see that a wide variety of learned folks here have given you responses that are well-thought-out and based on documented facts. You seem to ignore them because it takes the air out of your sails, and then you switch over to some other tangent for a while.

If someone says they disagree with one of my arguments, you count that as a well-thought-out response that refutes my position. Where you see convincing responses, I see responses that ignore at least half of the evidence I've presented and that offer illogical arguments about the evidence they do manage to discuss.

This little cottage industry and echo chamber here are amazing. I see that some are trying to discredit Professor Linder because he says the diary was red. And Linder, as I've shown, is not the only one who says the diary was red.

Furthermore, if I looked at a diary that was black on the outside and bright red on the inside, I would not describe it as a "black diary."

In any case, I'm still waiting for an explanation of what happened to the entries that the Garretts saw Boyd making in his diary, which were written *after* the last entry in the extant Booth diary.

(01-13-2019 03:08 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Re your statements above: Most learned scholars who do not have a sympathetic bend for Mrs. Surratt would point out to you that, even if Booth only decided to murder Lincoln on that specific day, Mrs. Surratt was still doing his bidding by the early afternoon - and that bidding was what led to her conviction and death, not what had been done previously, but what she did that day. You can blame it on Weichmann and Lloyd, but their testimonies supplemented each other's and I have never read where they had a chance to get together and "practice" their corroborating stories.

You don't have a shred of evidence that would stand up in front of a sentient jury to back up any of these timeworn talking points. Weichmann never even said that Booth gave Mary Surratt anything until after the conspiracy trial and after she was dead and buried--how convenient. The defense provided hard evidence that Mary went to Surrattsville to try to collect her debt from Nothey because she was being pressed by her creditor. Weichmann was forced to admit that Mary told him about the creditor's note and her need to go back to Surrattsville *before* Booth knew for certain that Lincoln would be at the theater that night. Mary encountered Lloyd purely by chance on April 11--near the Navy Yard Bridge on the way to Surrattsville--and did not even initiate the conversation: Lloyd got out of his buggy to come talk to her, not the other way around. The whole field glasses story smells to high heaven, from start to finish. It makes no sense that Booth would have bothered having anyone take a tiny pair of field glasses to Lloyd when he could have much more easily carried them in his pocket. Lloyd refused to ID the alleged Booth field glasses at the John Surratt trial. Baker's story about supposedly finding the glasses is full of holes. Weichmann's description of the package does not even remotely match how a small pair of opera glasses would have looked when wrapped. When Mary arrived at Surrattsville on April 14, she made no inquiries about Lloyd but did ask about Nothey; she waited for Nothey; and then she sent him an angry note just before leaving. Lloyd just happened to show up just as she and Weichmann were about to leave. Etc., etc., etc.

(01-13-2019 03:08 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Also, knowing Booth's proclivity to go for the theatrical as well as his rabid hatred for the man and the Union that he perceived to have destroyed the country that he cherished, it is also plausible that he wished to return to Washington to mount a bully pulpit and show how he tried to save the country from the evil forces that had or would overtake it. I do not believe that he would or could point to specific ringleaders (if any existed) who had planned and financed an assassination plot and secured him as the hired killer.

That's your Emperor's New Clothes psychoanalysis. We'll never know because supposedly 28 soldiers could not manage to bring him back alive to be interrogated.

(01-13-2019 03:08 PM)L Verge Wrote:  You still are not paying attention to the 1977 FBI Report. It does not state what you keep posting. This is more of the flim-flam that I suspect you are inserting into good history.

Uh, yes it does. It most certainly states that sections were moved to other pages. It most certainly does say that 86 pages are missing. It most certainly does say that some of the missing pages were cut from various parts of the diary and that some were only partially cut.

The only "flim-flam" here is your continued refusal to deal with what the FBI report says in fiarly plain English. No objective person could read that report and conclude that all the missing pages were merely torn out by Booth so he could write notes to people. That is absurd.

As for "good history," I am reminded that you are the one who made the jaw-dropping claim, based on some paper that one of your Surratt Society members presented, that Lincoln did not have any specific Reconstruction plan and that his plan was to have no plan. That is akin to saying that George McGovern won the 1972 presidential election. Lincoln most certainly did have a detailed Reconstruction plan, which varied slightly by state, and his plan has been discussed in hundreds of scholarly books on the subject for the last 145 years.

(01-13-2019 03:08 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Also, more than 18 pages are missing

Uh, yeah, I know that. That's why I specified that I was talking about the 18 pages that had been identified as missing at that point, i.e., when Butler made his remarks. Now would you care to explain why those pages were already written on before they were torn out? That makes it kind of hard to suggest that they were torn out to write notes on, hey?

(01-13-2019 03:08 PM)L Verge Wrote:  . . . but perhaps what Booth was writing at Garrett's is still in the remaining pages? Maybe a last-minute thought for his personal "memorial?"

Uh, ok, then where are those pages in the extant diary? Where are they? His last entry is dated three days before the Garretts saw Boyd writing in a black diary. So how would that have worked? Did Booth accidentally--or, odder still, purposely--leave some blank pages, write on pages that came after them, and then decide to go back and write on the blank pages?! Is that your theory? Why don't the dates match, then? Why aren't there entries dated for when the Garretts saw Boyd writing in his diary?

You see, rather than just admit the obvious problem here, you must come up with illogical, unreasonable theories to avoid the clear implications of the evidence. People write in diaries in chronological order. They write on one page and then on the next page. That's how 99.9% of the human race writes in their diaries, if they keep one. In all the diaries I've read in researching various subjects, I've never seen a diary like the one you feel obliged to posit. Nor do people edit their diaries in the way you folks are suggesting that Booth "edited" his: they don't shift sections around (why on earth would anyone do that?), and they don't remove some pages here, partial pages there, cutting off some pages in midstream, etc., etc. Nobody does that to their own diary.

Of course, there is one obvious theory that you could float to address the problem: you could theorize that the pages that Booth wrote at the Garrett farm were among the 86 pages that were torn out. But, uh-oh, that would require you to admit that the pages were removed after Conger had the diary, and you don't dare do that because that would raise all sorts of troubling questions.

Finally, an escaped John Wilkes Booth would not have dreamed of trying to clear his name after the government claimed he was dead. If you're trying to get away and you find out that the government is claiming that you've been killed, why in the world would you want to risk going back to Washington to try to clear your name? Booth thought about doing that while he was still acknowledged as being alive, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, but he would have had to be supremely dumb to have thought about doing such a thing after he was declared dead.

[Steve]

(01-19-2019 04:34 PM)mikegriffith1 Wrote:  Uh, ok, then where are those pages in the extant diary? Where are they? His last entry is dated three days before the Garretts saw Boyd writing in a black diary. So how would that have worked? Did Booth accidentally--or, odder still, purposely--leave some blank pages, write on pages that came after them, and then decide to go back and write on the blank pages?! Is that your theory? Why don't the dates match, then? Why aren't there entries dated for when the Garretts saw Boyd writing in his diary?

You see, rather than just admit the obvious problem here, you must come up with illogical, unreasonable theories to avoid the clear implications of the evidence. People write in diaries in chronological order. They write on one page and then on the next page. That's how 99.9% of the human race writes in their diaries, if they keep one. In all the diaries I've read in researching various subjects, I've never seen a diary like the one you feel obliged to posit. Nor do people edit their diaries in the way you folks are suggesting that Booth "edited" his: they don't shift sections around (why on earth would anyone do that?), and they don't remove some pages here, partial pages there, cutting off some pages in midstream, etc., etc. Nobody does that to their own diary.

Booth was clearly writing in his diary until at least April 25, 1865. If you look at the makeshift calendar Booth wrote in the calendar, the days are crossed off until April 25th. The image of the calendar below is a gif that switches between the original image and an easier to read transcription, courtesy of the BoothieBarn website:



The makeshift calendar starts on April 17th, indicating that Booth wrote the calendar out to June 18th on either April 16th or 17. He continued marking off each day until April 25th, when he was definitely able to have been seen writing in the diary at Garrett's farm.

[AussieMick]

(01-19-2019 04:34 PM)mikegriffith1 Wrote:  I see responses that ignore at least half of the evidence I've presented and that offer illogical arguments about the evidence they do manage to discuss.

Mike, I know you will not pay much heed to this but I must write it.

I'm willing to admit (and I think many other would agree) that there are issues involving the assassination the full details about which we are unlikely to ever know. There are (IMO) inconsistencies in the various accounts.

It seems to me that you have identified some of these points. And you've managed to produce some possible scenarios which address some of the inconsistencies.

Unfortunately you insist on highlighting 'inconsistencies' that are either minor (no real impact on the main events) or which exist only as a result of poorly documented 'evidence' or which conflict with other evidence that is as solid as can be expected for those times.

(No, I'm not going to itemise all of them)

Mike, if there were no inconsistencies then (IMO) it would be highly suspicious. Everything neat and tidy. Everything explained. Thats when I would suspect a cover-up.

You'd do better (I suggest) by focusing on the major flaw/unknowns in the accepted account of events and ripping into them. But then of course your thesis (if I may call it that) would be much harder work for you and much less dramatic.

[GustD45]

Unfortunately Mike G is so focused on seeing conspiracies nothing any of the experts (sorry Laurie, Mick, Rob) on this site can tell him that he will believe. Conspiracy theorists will always discount documented evidence in favor of elaborate conspiracies. Our friend Mr. G falls into this pattern as well as Dr. Balsiger and Nate O. They are all lost causes, but fun to read and pick apart their ludicrous theories.