Stupid question?

[Tom Bogar]

(02-04-2016 03:00 PM)loetar44 Wrote:  Speaking about Matthews there are conflicting stories about his whereabouts after Booth shot Lincoln. Where did he burn the letter Booth gave him earlier that day?

Tom Bogar writes in his “Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination” that Mathews was picked up on Friday April 21, and that his L STREET BOARDINGHOUSE room was searched, but nothing was discovered to tie him to the crime.” This is the ONLY reference to L-Street.

George Bryan writes in “The Great American Myth”: “Matthews, who seems to have been thoroughly terrified by what had happened, went straight to his room in the PETERSEN HOUSE and locked the door. He expected that Ford's would be burned. When he removed his coat, the letter Booth had handed him dropped to the floor. He opened and read it.

Kathryn Canavan writes in “Lincoln’s Final Hours”: “Mathews lived upstairs at PETERSEN’S BOARDINGHOUSE, the house directly across the street from Ford’s Theatre where President Lincoln was taken after he was shot. A few weeks before, Mathews rented the downstairs room where President Lincoln died. Booth sometimes visited him there, stretching out on the bed, laughing and telling stories, his pipe hooked in his mouth.” This is correct but she also writes: “Mathews and other Ford’s actors made for the exits to avoid police. Mathews retreated to his boardinghouse across the street , the same house where the president lay dying [= PETERSON HOUSE]. He walked past the armed guards and climbed straight upstairs to his room totally unaware that Booth’s letter was about to fall out of his overcoat pocket”.

And what about this? Is it true (as Katryn Canavan writes) that John Mathews almost got himself hanged twice on assassination night? Two crowds tried to hang him later that night solely because he knew Booth. He escaped the first. The second time, the rope was already looped around his neck when some soldiers rescued him. Never heard that story.

Hope I can help clarify things a little. Let me address the boardinghouse issue first: Mathews did occasionally rent the first floor rear room at Petersen's, as recently as March 1865, but at the time of the assassination he had switched (I do not know why) and was boarding at 233 L. St. NW. He mentions at one point in being questioned the name of his landlady (I'd have to dig through too many boxes to get her name), and this was her address, plus John (misspelled) Matthews is listed in the 1865 Washington DC directory (published May 1865--perhaps a carryover from the old May 1 Moving Day in NY) thusly: "boards 233 L St. north." He describes (as part of the Johnson impeachment hearings) getting out of the theatre undetected (by soldiers in the theatre, not necessarily at Petersen's) and rushing to his room, reading the letter through several times (convincing me, at least, that with his actor's memory he could have recited parts of it, jumbled somewhat with the famous "To Whom it May Concern" letter), and then tearing it up and burning the pieces in the grate of his room; also, (if I recall correctly) there is no fireplace in the room in which Lincoln died.

I only know of one near-hanging incident, which occurred early on the morning of April 15. I describe it on p. 132 of BATLA. Mathews went looking for Harry Hawk, found him in a saloon, and began questioning him about Booth. An angry crowd tried to string him up from a lamppost, but soldiers intervened. My source for that is its narration in the New York Dramatic Mirror Jan. 21, 1905, one of his lengthier obits. I do not know of a second incident.