A letter from Dr. Leale

[STS Lincolnite]

Was doing an online search this evening for something else entirely and came across this little tidbit. A personal letter from Dr. Charles Leale to a colleague(?) dated May 28, 1865. In it he describes his actions on the night of April 14th - which most of us have seen before in other statements.

The thing that caught my interest was the fact that he stated he had attended the trial of the conspirators...that was new to me. Here is what he said:

"The trial of the conspirators is going on. I went to see them last week at the Court room. They are a very inferior looking set of men Dr. Mudd is the only one that has any intellectual expressions (I hope that if the charges are true against him he will be unable to tell what school he recv'd his Dip[loma] from). They all look as if they did not have any hope. O'Laughlin is very nervous and trembles terribly they are all very pale except the Dr"

Sounds like Dr. Leale hoped that if Dr. Mudd was found guilty it would turn out he was not a real physician. Trying to protect the integrity of his profession I guess.

Here is the weblink which provides pictures of the letter as well as a transcript. Looks like there are some other interesting documents on this site as well that I will explore when I get more time.

http://www.shapell.org/manuscript.aspx?e...assination