Mudd Descendants visit Fort Jefferson NP

[Dave Taylor]

There are only two sources (that I know of) that espouse the idea that there was any sort of password/sign countersign. They are Finis Bates and Frederick Demond.

Let's be clear, Finis Bates was the first person to claim that there was a sign and countersign at the Navy Yard bridge. He claimed to have received this realization from John St. Helen aka "John Wilkes Booth". According to St. Helen, he was told by Vice President Johnson to use the sign "T.B." and "T.B. Road" in order to get over the Navy Yard bridge without incident. This is the story that Bates includes in his book. As we all know, John St. Helen was not John Wilkes Booth and therefore the entire story was fictional. Either St. Helen or Bates, is lying.

Bates, the crafty man that he is, doubles down on the fictional password scenario however. He attempts to prove its legitimacy by providing two statements. One of them is a newspaper article from 1897 from David Dana. Dana commanded the troops of the 13th NY Cavalry and stationed his men at Bryantown. It was to Dana that George Mudd, reported the arrival of two strangers to his cousin, Dr. Samuel Mudd's, farm. Sadly, Dana sat on this information for some time before sending men out to investigate. Therefore Dana would have had a good, and true, story to tell in 1897. However, in addition to painting himself in a far more heroic light, Dana's 1897 account also added a new, and suspect, story.

According to Dana in 1897:

Quote: "On Friday, April 14, 1865, two men appeared before the guard on the road leading into Washington from the east. Refusing to give their names or state their business, they were arrested and put in the guard tent, whence they were to be sent to headquarters. This was about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. In an hour or two they gave their names as Booth and Herold."

While it is thought that David Herold was in Southern Maryland on the night of April 13th, and therefore would be making his way back into D.C. on the morning of the 14th, it is well established that Booth was in Washington, D.C. all day on April 14th until his escape. David Dana is once again either embellishing his story or the passage of thirty two years has caused understandable errors in his memory.

But here's my favorite part. Not only does Bates spend an entire chapter of his book supporting and attempting to convince us all that David Dana is supporting the claims made by John St. Helen, but, in the very next chapter, Bates is attempting to prove that David Dana had prior knowledge of Lincoln's assassination. Bates writes, "In this connection I challenge to the conduct of Gen. Dana, as we left him at Bryantown resting under the seeming shadows of treacherous conduct..." It is important to note that David Dana died in 1906, and that Bates published his book one year later, in 1907. It's easier to libel a dead man who can't defend himself.

Thus far however, all Bates has "proven" is that John St. Helen's story meshes with part of Dana's dated narrative. Dana, however, makes NO mention of any password or countersign. Bates claims this is because Dana was party to the assassination plot and therefore withheld admitting this piece. In order to "prove" St. Helen's password story, Bates relies on Demond.

In 1897, after reading Dana's account in the newspaper, Frederick Demond, wrote the General a letter. In the letter Demond recounts how he was stationed as a guard on the Uniontown side of the Navy Yard bridge. Silas Cobb, you'll remember was on the Washington side and was the one who allowed Booth and then Herold to pass. Demond was on the Maryland side of the bridge.

Demond wrote to Dana, in part:

Quote:"I was present the night that Booth and Herold crossed after Booth had shot the President, but was not on post. I stood in the door of the block house when Booth rode up and heard him ask the guard if anyone had gone through lately. I heard the guard on the post answer him, 'No' and ask him what he was doing out there this time of night?

He made some kind of answer about going to see some one who lived out on the T. B. road. I did not pay much attention at this time to what they were talking about. I helped open the gate and he rode through.

A short time after this Herold rode over the bridge and asked if there had been anyone through mounted on a bay horse. Upon being told that there had, he muttered something about being a pretty man not to wait for him.

Well, we opened the gate and let him through and he rode off in a hurry. About twenty minutes later, I should say, we heard a great uproar across the bridge and in a short time got word of the assassination. If we had only known it sooner neither one of them would have passed us, as I would have shot them as quickly as I would a mad dog. But it was too late ; they were out of sight and hearing by
that time."

Finally, Bates has a straw to grasp at and boy does he. Bates immediately misconstrues Demond's phrase that Booth, "...made some kind of answer about going to see some one who lived out on the T. B. road." into iron clad validation that Booth said T.B. and T.B. Road as a password and countersign. But that is not what Demond says. Demond is only stating that, 32 years later, he believes he recalls hearing Booth mention something about visiting someone in T.B. All of this is while Demond is standing in the block house door and listening to one of the other guards question Booth. This hardly equals the sign and countersign scenario that Bates claimed he got from St. Helen. Still, with something to go on, Bates re-purposes the letter to fit his narrative.

Likely knowing that his proof here is a little thin, Bates then reaches out to Demond, hoping to sway him into saying what he wants. Those correspondences, are the ones that Mr. Fazio has and the ones I would very much like to see. It's clear that in 1897, Demond did not attest to any password or countersign, merely that Booth said he was going to T.B. (which he did, by the way). It seems likely that, with repeated pushes from Bates to remember things his way, Demond eventually acquiesced to Bates' story. I'm sure the letters fulfill Dr. Alford's impression of, "Old-age stuff, very confused".

I would also like to point out that Bates was not above paying people to say what he wanted them to say. Two of John Wilkes Booth's nieces were close to destitute in the early 1900's and Bates paid both Blanche DeBar Booth and Marion Booth Douglass handsomely for their sworn testimonies to his theories. Perhaps Bates helped Demond's memory along with a few bucks? Who knows.

Ultimately, the whole password/countersign scenario comes from Finis Bates, which should be enough to dismiss it entirely. But even if the taint of Bates doesn't send you running, none of the statements attesting to it come from before the year 1897. That means the few accounts saying there was a password and countersign were all first recorded 32 (or more) years after the event they claim took place! Human memory is a frail and fluid thing. Even ignoring the assumed memory loss that comes with aging, our minds are constantly altering our memories. Studies have shown that, among many things, imagining an event having taken place can create a false memory of it actually occurring, the manner in which you are asked about an event can change the way you remember it, and the more often you recall something the more the memory changes. We need to be objective and neurologically analytical of all accounts that are dated so far from the events they describe as there has been more time for the above named "memory tricks" to have occurred. While we know that eyewitness accounts of traumatic events, like Lincoln being shot at Ford's, also produces it's own set of memory problems. Still, logically and neurologically, memories recalled from long periods of time are inherently less accurate and therefore less credible.

Silas Cobb and John T. Fletcher both gave statements in April of 1865, and neither one described any password or countersign. But better than that, in 1865, even Frederick Demond made no mention of a password or countersign.

I looked up the newspaper article that Laurie mentions that was published in 1964. The article recounts the discovery and publication of a letter by Frederick Demond, by his great niece. In the letter, written on April 21, 1865, from Frederick Demond to his brother George, states:

Quote:"The night that the President was shot, I was on guard about 11 o'clock. They came over the bridge two men on horses and they told us the President was shot.

The next day we found out that the very same men that told us that he was shot was the very same man that shot hime. If we had known it a half hour sooner we would have got the reward, which is 40,000 dollars. It was too bad that we had not have known it sooner. If we have we could have stopped them.

I saw Booth myself when he crossed the bridge and if I ever see him again, you better believe that I will stop him."

There is no mention of a password, no mention of a countersign, no mention of T.B. Instead, Demond, in a somewhat confusing way, implies that it was either Booth or Herold that announced to the guards that Lincoln had been assassinated. No one else (as far as I know) ever claimed that. While interesting, it still does not support Demond's later yielding to Bates. One would think Demond would mention to his brother (and to the authorities at the time) that Booth said he was headed down to T.B. This information would have been very useful to those hunting Booth. Perhaps the lack of it in his 1865 letter demonstrates that, years later, his memory added the part about T.B. after having learned it was the way that Booth went.

I apologize for the length of this post. In my eyes, there is no credible evidence to support Finis Bates' theory that John Wilkes Booth used a password to cross the Navy Yard bridge. The evidence that supports this idea are statements by Frederick Demond purposefully misconstrued by Bates in order to fit his theory that the assassination of Lincoln was enacted by Vice President Johnson and that John Wilkes Booth escaped his death at the Garrett farm.