Was there an assassin on Grant's train?

[L Verge]

There was something that I wanted to mention earlier in regards to Louis Weichmann. Mention was made that none of the conspirators accused Weichmann of wrong doing. Actually, Samuel Arnold did - albeit after the fact (1867). In his treatise on Defence and Prison Experiences of..., Arnold states that Weichmann had passed on to Booth information obtained on his job in the War Department under General Hoffman, Commissary General of Prisons (as in data on what was being given to Confederate prisoners being held by the Union Army).

And here is John Surratt's assessment of his friend Weichmann, given during the December 6, 1870, lecture at Rockville, Maryland: "I proclaim it here and before the world that Louis J. Weichmann was a party to the plan to abduct President Lincoln. He had been told all about it, and was constantly importuning me to let him become an active member. I refused, for the simple reason that I told him that he could neither ride a horse nor shoot a pistol, which was a fact.

"I have very little to say of Louis J. Weichmann. But I do pronounce him a base-born perjurer; a murderer of the meanest hue! Give me a man who can strike his victim dead, but save me from a man who, through perjury, will cause the death of an innocent person. Double murderer!!!! Hell possesses no worse fiend than a character of that kind. Away with such a character. I leave him in the pit of infamy, which he has dug for himself, a prey to the lights of his guilty conscience."

One last thing - Most people who have read about Weichmann know that he ended up in Anderson, Indiana. But how many of you know how long it took him to move there?

After the 1865 trial, Stanton and Holt got him a job as a clerk at the Philadelphia Custom House. He lost that job in 1866, when President Johnson purged people in the government who had gotten their jobs via Republican Party influence. When Grant came into office, Stanton arranged for Weichmann to get his job back at the Custom House. The job was lost again when the Democrats came to power in 1886. It was only then that Weichmann moved to Indiana, first teaching in a business school and then opening a school of his own.

Stanton and Holt were certainly kind and considerate of their star witness -- much more so than with John Lloyd, who sued the government for damages to the Surrattsville crops and never got a penny.