Why was Booth admitted into the presidential box?

[loetar44]

(04-16-2015 04:26 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  Kees, I agree that Forbes' activities that night are elusive and tough to nail down.

Mr. Steers is very specific in his “Lincoln’s Assassination” (2014): “Charles Forbes … was … seated at the end of a row that placed him closest to the outer door to the box” (p. 53)

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(04-16-2015 06:01 PM)L Verge Wrote:  And talk about coincidence, I received a call today from a gentleman who has a small, but impressive, collection - one item of which is a letter that Mary wrote regarding Forbes and the draft. Maybe more will be revealed...

There is an unproven theory that Mary Todd Lincoln was distantly related to John Frederick Parker, via her mother Eliza Parker….

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I did some reading today and found that it was Captain Theodore McGowan of the Veteran Reserve Corps who made the statement of the encounter between Booth and someone, just before Booth entered the President’s box. McGowan was sitting in the aisle leading by the wall toward the door of the box. He wrote on May 15, 1865 that he saw three to five feet from where he was sitting a brief encounter between “a man” and “the President’s messenger”. He said that the man took a visiting card from his pocket and showed it to the President’s messenger He did NOT say that it was Forbes and he did not say that the man got permission to enter the box. He only said that he saw the man go through the door and that he closed the door.

Sitting next to McGowan was Lieutenant Alexander Crawford. He gave his account to Stanton at the Petersen House immediately after the assassination. He declared that he looked up (four or five times ) at the man who came in, and that this man suddenly stepped into the President’s box.

Note that McGowan and Crawford were sitting right next to each other and that they both observed the same event. McGowan spoke about a brief encounter and a “visiting card”, but Crawford did not.

Dr. Leale gave an account on July 20, 1867 (to Maj. Gen Butler), 2 years after the event (!), saying that he saw a man speaking with another (a “reluctant usher”) near the outer door and that the man entered, after which the door was closed and the usher resumed his place. No names. Was the usher from Ford’s?

This are the only accounts of eyewitnesses I’ve found. All other accounts are secondary and therefore not substantially accurate. Even the three eyewitness accounts are not in consistence with each other … visiting card, no visiting card, President’s messenger, usher, conversation, no conversation. According to a June 1865 Harper’s Magazine article Booth was stopped by a “sentinel”.

Will we ever know exactly what happened in front of the outer door that night? I suspect that all interpretation is a kind of “reading into”, or call it “cherry picking” , a selection of facts that support a conclusion that you want to find, but might not reflect the truth, nobody knows exactly. Is the right German expression “hineininterpretierung”, Eva?