Anna Surratt interview

[RJNorton]

(07-15-2013 01:15 PM)J. Beckert Wrote:  How does Mills explain the diary entry?

He writes quite a bit about this. Here is some of it:

"The diary reference, of course, could have been to any letter Booth might have written and left to be discovered among his belongings; the exact diary language suggests this. Such a manuscript would certainly have been censored and probably destroyed. Or Booth could have mailed the letter (a much safer course as we will discuss presently), and the newspaper could have turned it over to Stanton without printing it. Newspapers cooperated with Stanton to a fault, and from Booth's diary entry he obviously feared censorship.

Under analysis, only Mathews' own word stands behind his story. Historians have accepted it, perhaps overlooking the fact that the actor could have framed the entire tale to fit the text of Booth's diary (by then a public document)..."

I think part of Mills' suspicion of Mathews' story is that Mathews said nothing about the letter in 1865 and kept quiet on the matter until 1867. Mills does a lot of thinking outside the box in his book, and this is just one of the many topics in which he differs with the great majority of historians.