Clara Harris's Bloody Dress

[L Verge]

I have never looked into this, but my instinct is that Booth was being brought the Washington Star and the National Intelligencer. The stagecoach out of D.C. came into Southern Maryland every other day of the week - excluding Sundays - so the people of that area were pretty savvy about what was the latest news. Thomas Jones, especially, would have a system of retrieving current newspapers because he had been sending the D.C. papers to Richmond for four years.

My gut instinct is also to surmise that the reporters may not have known whether or not Rathbone was in uniform. They may have just heard him referred to as Major (or Colonel) and made the assumption that he was in uniform -- for the very reasons that Bill cited above.

I also object to the often commented on "exaggerations" in Booth's diary. He was writing in florid Victorian style of the day and with a hint of Shakespeare thrown in (that he had grown up with). A theater full of people seemed like thousands to him, I'm sure; he did not have an odometer on either horse to judge the distance that he had ridden - plus the roads have straightened out and become easier to traverse just since I was a child around these parts; he was trying to explain his reasonings for why Lincoln had to die; etc. etc. and so forth. And, he was a much better writer in style and flourish than 80% (or more) of Americans today.

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Caleb - Have you been in contact with Mike Kauffman concerning the bloody dress? Nearly a decade ago, when he was still doing the narrating for the Surratt Booth Tours, he would mention talking to a Rathbone descendant. My mind is vague on this, but I believe that he was told the story of the dress being discovered in a bricked up closet and that one of Clara's daughters fainted at the sight of it. She remembered stepping over her dead mother's body years later when the children had to get out of the room that their nanny and Clara had protected them in. When this daughter saw the blood on that dress, it brought back memories of that awful night of her mother's murder.

I hope I have the story straight 'cause the mind ain't what it used to be...