Will the real Thomas F. Harney, PLEASE STAND UP!

[L Verge]

(06-23-2016 04:50 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  I am still confused over whether the plan to bomb the White House was a Northern plot or a Southern plot. Atzerodt states it was a Northern plot. Whereas Snyder's statement to Ripley implies that the Harney mission was a Southern plan. This makes me wonder if Mr. Stelnick were right all along - that there were officials in Richmond (such as Benjamin) actually working with the "Northern crowd." If this were true, Booth may have told Atzerodt that the Northerners were behind the plot and left out the part that Southerners were going to carry it out. If powerful Northerners were actually working with powerful Southerners to kill Lincoln, did Booth know it?

IMO most members of the Northern crowd were powerful men involved in the cotton trade. Some of these men were good friends of Lincoln. Cotton prices became so inflated due to the war that some of these men made a ton of money in the futures market. This would be fine if they were "long" cotton, but they stayed long cotton "too long" and didn't short cotton when the price dropped like a rock. As the war wore down, they began losing so much money that they wanted another President whom they thought would rev up the war again, thus increasing cotton prices and recouping their losses. This theory would have it that Lincoln was targeted for financial reasons as prolonging the war would benefit the traders as cotton futures rose.

So is it possible the Harney plan was actually a combined Northern and Southern plot?

That is the theory that I have been cogitating on for years, Roger. One had the money, the other had the know-how in munitions (and remember that a coal bomb was supposedly on Jeff Davis's desk). And one of the best wheelers and dealers in finance took off when Richmond fell and never came back.

I'm referring to Judah Benjamin, who lived quite well in exile -- either with some Confederate gold or some backing from financiers. We have yet to find the golden thread of evidence that can tie both North and South together on this issue, but research from Hall et al., Stelnick, and our own John Fazio sure leads one to think along those lines.

P.S. Wasn't one of Mr. Lincoln's sisters-in-law part of the cotton deals?