Assassination-Related Suicide?

[Jill Mitchell]

OK...I am officially confused again. I looked up the references cited by Betty. Mike Kauffman in American Brutus (p. 325) says: "In Baltimore, authorities thought they were on to something when they learned that Joseph Thomas, who had once lived with Powell at the Branson house, had slit his own throat. News of his death did not reach Stanton until much later, and he angrily ordered General Wallace to have the corpse disinterred and embalmed for identification." Note "slit his own throat," not "by shooting himself with a pistol" as reported in the newspaper article cited by Henry Bascom Smith. Roscoe, page 512: ""So did the suicide of one Joseph Thomas, an inmate of Mrs. Branson's boardinghouse in Baltimore. Thomas was reported as having been a friend of Lewis Paine's. Stanton ordered the body disinterred and shipped to Washington for official examination. Department files contain no record of the inquest, but the suicide is noted with appropriate satisfaction." The references in The Evidence are to Joseph Thomas, but do not indicate the manner in which his suicide was accomplished. Provost Marshal Wooley in his letter of April 28 to Lew Wallace says of Thomas (Evidence, p. 1381): "Thomas was boarding at the Howard House, was in excellent circumstances, had a good business, was a man of very quiet demeanor, but of late had been drinking whiskey to a very great excess and to this the cause of his suicide seemed to be universally attributed." I did not find any citation Kauffman provides for "slit his own throat" and haven't been successful yet in finding anything about Thomas to establish cause of death. I think it safe at this point to say (1) that the body that was disinterred was that of Joseph Thomas, and (2) that Stanton, if a fit of pique ordered its exhumation on the pretense of establishing a positive identification. I would think the weapon of choice for a drunkard to (successfully) commit suicide would be the pistol rather than the knife, so wish we knew more about the source of Kauffman's "slit his own throat" reference.