Lincoln Assassination Conspiracy Trial Jeopardy

[Leon Greene]

(05-06-2016 05:00 PM)Anita Wrote:  Thank you for the detailed information on the contaminated clothing and bedding. I've read that they contained blood and puss. Why would people pay for these at auction and if the White House had received the trunk intended for Lincoln, why would Dr. Blackburn believe that Lincoln would be given such filthy used clothing?

Great question, Anita! Your skepticism establishes you as a saavy shopper.

You're right that the contaminated articles of clothing and bedding were badly soiled with vomit, blood, and excrement. In fact, Blackburn preferred the worst soiled garments, and he favored those items from patients who died. Obviously these items would not likely sell well in the used clothing stores of the day in the North. We learn of his technique from the intended second shipment, the one that was intercepted before it left Bermuda. (The first was in the Spring of 1864; the second was to be in the late Spring or Summer of 1865). Blackburn alternately layered his clothes: clean-dirty-clean-dirty. It wasn't an attempt to hide the soiled garments; it was a method to infuse the contagion into the clean ones. The first shipment left Bermuda in March 1864; it wasn't sold until August 1864. That means the soiled garments were in close contact with the clean ones for about 3-4 months. Blackburn must have thought that this amount of time was sufficient to allow passage of the infectious material from one layer to another. The clean-appearing ones would be salable, but they would still have the essence of yellow fever - whatever that was - imbedded in them. LIkewise, the fancy shirt that Blackburn had intended to be given to Lincoln was treated similarly. It was to be kept in close contact with soiled items until the expected delivery to the President. We don't know what happened to the valise containing this shirt.

The second shipment of trunks was intercepted in the Spring of 1865 before they left Bermuda. The items were thoroughly inspected by the Bermuda Police, by Nathaniel Jackson, St. George's "Nuisance Inspector," and by Dr. Benjamin Burland, the Health Officer of the East End of Bermuda. They discovered the clean-dirty-clean-dirty layering. We know that no one died as a result of this inspection, belying the notion that the contents could "kill a man at 60 yards." After the garments were itemized, and witnessed, they were buried on Nonsuch Island in Bermuda, one of the smaller and sparsely inhabited islands where a quarantine station had been built. Later, just to be sure that the contamination never emerged to sicken anyone, the police bored holes in the underground trunks and poured acid into them.

By the way, it's known that a mosquito can survive in conditions like those that existed in the trunks for only a maximum of 24-48 hours. There's no chance that any of the reported epidemics that emerged in the areas where the trunks were delivered could have been caused by mosquitoes still surviving within the trunks.

So the shoppers in the North who were to be the recipients and purchasers of these contaminated articles didn't ever see the filth and smell of the original dirty items. It was the clean ones, the ones into which the "contagion" of yellow fever had seeped, that were displayed for sale.