Lincoln Assassination Conspiracy Trial Jeopardy

[Leon Greene]

(05-06-2016 05:05 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Dr. Greene, do you know if Dr. Blackburn spent his entire life believing that if Godfrey Hyams had delivered the valise to the White House the "infected" dress shirts might have killed Abraham Lincoln? Or did he learn later in life that yellow fever could not be spread by the clothing of yellow fever victims (or in Lincoln's case by exposing the dress shirts to "contaminated" clothing of yellow fever victims)?

Roger, the contagion theory of the transmission of yellow fever (as well as other diseases) persisted until 1901 when Dr. Walter Reed discovered the need for a mosquito vector to pass the disease from one person to another. Likely Blackburn clung to his death to the concept that exposure to contaminated clothing could transmit the disease. He died in 1887.

We know that the trunks with the contaminated clothing and bedding were transported as far as Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Blackburn's accomplice Godfrey J. Hyams (using the alias "J. W. Harris") repacked the material into other less suspicious-looking trunks, likely eight in number. (Of course, one should question how Hyams could do this transfer if the contents were so deadly that they "could kill a man at 60 yards." But those are just pesky details.) Testimony at the Lincoln Assassination Trial confirmed that a merchant in Washington, D.C., named W. L. Wall and Company, located at 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue, called an "auction and commission merchant," received five of the eight trunks on August 5, 1864. Wall and his employee Mr. A. Brenner (sometimes referred to as "Albert Bremier") sold materials from at least one of the contaminated trunks later in August 1864. (See the Benn Pitman Lincoln Trial Testimony Transcription, pages 55-57, and Exhibit #74 in the Trial Evidence). The trial testimony even itemizes the clothing sold - 96 shirts, 9 coats, etc.

Other trunks were shipped toward New Bern, North Carolina (often called "Newbern" then). There large Union strongholds of troops and civilians were the targets of the contaminated goods. It's unclear if the trunks ever reached their destination; the conspirators attributed an outbreak of yellow fever there in 1864 to their plot, but of course we know know that it had nothing to do with the epidemic since yellow fever cannot be transmitted by that method.

Hyams, for all of his complicity, refused to have anything to do with the valise containing the fancy shirt, allegedly contaminated with yellow fever, intended for President Lincoln. Hyams was willing to kill thousands of innocent civilians in large Northern cities, but he balked at the thought of killing the President. No one was ever able to track the valise. It likely never arrived at the White House.

We know almost nothing from Blackburn himself about his thoughts in his later years regarding the yellow fever plot. During his race for the Governorship of Kentucky in 1879, he simply avoided discussing the topic, stating that the story was "too preposterous for intelligent gentlemen to believe." There's nothing in currently available Blackburn papers that reference this scandal. He discreetly avoided mentioning the plot in any of his memoirs. Our only window to any "confession" was an article published in the October 4, 1879, issue of the Cincinnati Daily Gazette. There the newspaper claimed that Blackburn "Admits the Yellow Fever Plot As Charged Upon Him, and Details all His Proceedings in the Business," citing a discussion Blackburn had held with friends years earlier in 1869. Since this story was printed during his campaign for the Governor of Kentucky, Blackburn never responded to its accusations.